Realmac Software has been schooling developers on how to make great apps since 2002. So when they brought Typed to OS X back in December, I couldn’t wait to get my hands on it. Two months on, I’m convinced it’s the best Markdown editor you can get on the Mac, so I spoke with Realmac founder Dan Counsell to find out how he and his team built it.

Love Clear, the slick iPhone to-do app? So do we. But if you’ve never tried Clear before — or if you bought Clear+ and want the minus version without paying for it — you’ll soon be able to download it, free of charge.

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Clear, the wonderful to-list management tool for Mac and iOS from Realmac Software, is finally going to get Reminders next February. It’s one of the most requested features from Clear’s more than one million users, and it will make the app even more useful than it already is.

In the late 90s, Tamagotchi pets were all the rage. The plastic, egg-shaped pocket computers came in bright colors and housed a virtual pet you had to take care of. Fast forward to late 2013, and the only pocket computers people carry around are smartphones and tablets.

Yesterday, the makers of apps like Clear and Heads Up! launched Hatch, a modern-day take on Tamagotchi for the iPhone. It’s a beautifully crafted game that utilizes the iPhone’s internals to make the pet, or Fugu, come to life.

We’re big fans of Clear, a simple and elegant to-do app by Realmac Software that has set entire new design standards across iOS apps thanks to its intuitive, easy-to-use swiping system.

The app itself is only $2, and worth every penny, but Realmac Software has teamed up with Starbucks this month to make the app free to all. Just follow the link below to get the app for free. Nice way to start the day, isn’t it?

Last summer we went hands-on with the Leap Motion, a futuristic controller for the Mac that lets you interact with OS X apps like Tom Cruise in Minority Report. It was a stunning experience, and it made the mouse and trackpad feel suddenly obsolete.

The folks at Realmac have been testing the Leap Motion controller with their most popular app, Clear. The Mac version of the task manager will be fully compatible with the Leap Motion when it ships to the public.

Here at Cult of Mac, we’re big fans of Clear, the elegant, zen-minimalist to-do app for the iPhone released by Impending and Realmac Software. That said, for all its attractiveness, it doesn’t actually push the bar very far technically… which, as it turns out, makes it a fairly trivial feat to recreate in HTML5!

The team at Realmac Software – makers of apps like LittleSnapper and RapidWeaver, among others – have posted their thoughts about what changes the Mac App Store may bring.

Lower prices is one. Perhaps not as low as we’ve seen for iOS, but certainly lower than many developers charge right now. The old argument applies: Apple is creating a marketplace that didn’t exist before. That’s why it takes its 30% cut, and why the overall volume of sales should increase (hopefully).

Another prediction is simpler apps that do, ahem, one thing well. Complicated do-everything applications are hard to put into categories, and hard to explain to customers in the limited space available on a typical App Store page. Apps that just do a single job are easier to understand in an instant, and therefore easier to sell.

That said, it’s important to remember that the Mac App Store is, for now at least, just one way to get software installed on your Mac. Developers will be free to sell their wares via their own websites using traditional methods. There’s going to be a transition period where software is bought and sold both ways. The question everyone’s asking is: how long will that period last? Years? Months?

If you develop for OS X, do you agree with Realmac’s thoughts? Are you planning to reduce prices, and re-focus your apps for selling in the App Store? Do you think the App Store is going to completely take over, and how long will that take?